On the list of possible midair emergencies, airline passengers are instructed on every flight what to do if the cabin pressure suddenly drops. “If the airplane loses pressure, oxygen masks will drop automatically,” the safety video on American Airlines flights says. “The yellow cup goes around your mouth and nose.”

But selfies and videos snapped Tuesday by passengers on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, which suffered an engine explosion and depressurization that caused the masks to fall, are proof that the safety warnings before takeoff are not always heeded. The photos show panicked passengers with the yellow oxygen masks around their mouths but not their noses.

Immediately after the engine exploded, throwing fragments into the side of the plane and fatally wounding one passenger, many of the passengers believed the airplane was going to crash. Their minds raced to how they could say goodbye to loved ones. Whether their masks were on properly was not a priority, some said later.

Timothy C. Bourman, 36, a pastor from Woodside, New York, whose wife, Amanda, was scrambling to get a message to their three daughters, said he could not figure out how to use his mask and quickly gave up trying. “I wasn’t having trouble breathing,” he said Thursday.

He also felt that fiddling with the mask was pointless. “I was thinking, ‘This plane is going into the ground.’”

When the engine exploded just after 11 a.m., about 20 minutes into the four-hour flight to Dallas from New York, the plane had reached an altitude of about 9,906 meters, short of its planned 11,582 meters, according to the flight data website FlightAware. At that altitude, supplemental oxygen is definitely necessary for survival, but the plane then descended so rapidly that it soon reached an altitude humans could tolerate for short periods.

Federal aviation regulations require supplemental oxygen for those flying at 3,810 meters or higher for 30 minutes or longer in a nonpressurized aircraft. At altitudes above 4,267 meters, pilots must use oxygen at all times. Above 4,572 meters, all occupants must be provided oxygen.

In the two minutes after the explosion, Southwest 1380 plunged about 8,000 feet, to about 7,924 meters. Within the next five minutes, the aircraft descended to about 3,352 meters. It was on the ground about 10 minutes later.

Former flight attendants said that Flight 1380 underscored the importance of the safety instructions delivered to passengers as the planes taxi to the runway. But it also revealed what many flight attendants already know: Passengers tune them out.

In this April 27, 1988 photo provided by Rob “Shack” Bennett, LCDR USN (ret), U.S. Navy instructor pilot, Tammie Jo Shults explains a flight maneuver to aviators at Naval Air Station Chase Field in Beeville, Texas, with squadron VT-26. Shults is being lauded as a hero in a harrowing emergency landing on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 after a passenger was partially blown out of her airliner’s damaged fuselage. She is also being hailed for her pioneering role in a career where she has been one of the few women at the controlsRob Bennett /
ASSOCIATED PRESS

“They probably didn’t pay attention to the emergency instructions,” Marguerite Bartlett, an American Airlines flight attendant in the 1960s, said in an interview. “I have been on many, many flights as a passenger, and an awful lot of do not pay attention.”

Bourman, who flies three or four times a year, acknowledged that over time, he began tuning out the safety instructions but that would not be the case going forward. “Next time I’m on a plane — it’s not going to be for a while, when I get the guts to get back on — I will listen,” he said.

“The only way you’re going to get people to do it is to scare the crap out of them,” he added.

During her five years as a flight attendant, Bartlett said, the oxygen masks never dropped during an emergency. But one flight that landed in Cincinnati skidded off the runway during a snowstorm.

In that moment, she said, it was clear the passengers had not remembered what to do.

“Everybody got out safely, but they really didn’t know the instructions,” she said, adding that she had to remind each passenger what to do in an emergency.

Jennifer Riordan, a businesswoman and mother of two died from sustained injuries after she was partly sucked out of the hole in the plane caused by the engine explosionMaria Brose /
The Albuquerque Journal via AP

For years, a flight attendant recited safety instructions over a loudspeaker, while another walked the aisle and demonstrated how to fasten a seat belt or inflate a life vest. In recent years, the in-person instructions have been replaced with splashy, choreographed videos.

When Grayce Schor started as a flight attendant in the 1970s for American Airlines, she would demonstrate for passengers how to tighten an oxygen mask if there was an emergency. But not once in her 35 years as a flight attendant were the oxygen masks needed in flight, she said.

“It’s not a big mask,” Schor, who retired from American Airlines in 2006, said in an interview, but “it is supposed to be around your nose and mouth.”

When Schor saw a photo from the Southwest Airlines flight on Tuesday, however, she shrugged off the passengers’ mistakes.

“I wouldn’t make a big deal,” she said. “They are still going to get the oxygen through your mouth.”

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